Culture

Through the Lens of Ezra Stoller

The survey of Stoller's subjects almost reads as a who's-who of modernist personalities, buildings, and art.

With the rise of Modernism and varied architectural theories came varied architectural photograph theories. Pedro Guerrero, photographer-of-choice for Frank Lloyd Wright, for one, preferred photographing each building full in the frame—like a piece of sculpture. Ezra Stoller, photographer of projects by Alvar Alto, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Breuer, for another, focused on details of projects. "Instead of relying on the power of an individual image, he considered photographs in sets and groups," his daughter Erica writes in the preface to Ezra Stoller Photographer, one of ARCHITECT's best books of 2012. She highlights one of his photos of the Salk Institute as an example: "[I]t is a complicated weave of layers and angles that encloses in the foreground and opens to the courtyard in the distance. Looking at this view, one's eye travels through the space, left, right, up, and down, near to far." The survey of Stoller's subjects almost reads as a who's-who of modernist personalities, buildings, and art—including a Miami parking garage, Philip Johnson's Glass House, Isamu Noguchi sculptures, and of course, the Seagram Building and Fallingwater. In addition to Erica's preface, essays by Andry Grundberg, John Morris Dixon, Nina Rappaport, and Akiko Busch provide insight into the man behind the camera and what it was about his photographs that set the standard that still stands today. • $65; Yale University, December 2012